Cold War pen pals are back in touch after nearly 60 years

Lisa Black, Tribune reporter

Nearly 60 years had passed since the final ominous letter arrived on Sept. 4, 1953, signed only by "Your German friend" and sent using a fake return address.

East Germany had banned American movies, quashed worker protests with bloody beatings and arrested citizens who spoke freely, the young man wrote. He described his hope for a reunified Germany "but not for a Russian Germany of misery and oppression."

Caryl May, 71, of Grayslake, had given little thought to her childhood pen pal until she came across the packet of brittle, yellowed letters stashed in a desk. One day last summer, she passed them to her visiting sister-in-law, Patricia Youngman, 86.

Thumbing through each letter, Youngman was entranced. She had just taken a class on modern Germany at the College of Lake County and knew about the violent upheavals that had wracked East Germany during the Soviet occupation. She wondered what had happened to the boy, Gerhard Boch.

"I couldn't put it aside," said Youngman, transfixed by the mystery the letters presented.

She offered a startling proposal for her sister-in-law: "Let's find him."

May had long assumed Gerhard was dead after that last gloomy letter but was willing to try. Old memories suddenly began to come back into focus, like how it had all started back in 1949.

It was four years after World War II ended, and she was a 10-year-old named Caryl Koepke. Her teacher started a pen pal program with a counterpart in Germany, and Caryl and Gerhard began to exchange letters in English. They also swapped photos and small gifts, some of which Caryl packaged for safekeeping.

At the time, she had recently moved from Chicago to a rural north suburb and was having trouble fitting in at her new school. The farm kids made fun of the dresses she wore and assumed, falsely, that her family was rich because they moved into a large house near the one-classroom Grange Hall School she attended.

Boch was three years older and lived across the Atlantic in occupied East Germany. He'd lost two older brothers in the war but seemed largely unaware of the political tension — at first.

He wrote in neat flowing cursive about his hometown, Reichenbach. At 13, he would soon be heading off to classes at "oberschule." He thanked Caryl for "the pretty photo and the delicious chocolate and the fine pencil with the Indian rubber."

He wrote again in 1950, saying he was studying German, English, Russian and Latin. Gerhard enjoyed camping, swimming and riding his bike into the hills that surround his hometown. He was upset that his little dog died. In another letter, he wrote that the family had acquired a new puppy, named Bobby. But he made no mention of the political turmoil in Germany, where he had lived under the Nazis until the Soviets took over in 1945.

By late summer 1951, he suggested in a letter that it was difficult for him to obtain "precious things" in East Germany. In 1953, he began revealing his unhappiness with Soviet rule, stating that American movies were banned.

"I hope your family is well and lives without cares and misery," he wrote. "Please tell me more about your life in America."

Then came the letter with a fabricated return address. Conditions were deteriorating in East Germany, he wrote. The Stasi was reading mail and bugging phones. The letters stopped.

Nearly six decades later, as May and Youngman began to look for answers, Youngman contacted a German history teacher she had met at the community college in Grayslake.

"I had to see what happened," Youngman said.

"It is an amazing story," she said. "It was looking through that period of history through that young boy's eyes."

At first, the teacher, Anette Isaacs, a German native who lives in Evanston, thought it would be impossible to locate Boch.

"The man is 74. I thought, 'Maybe he's not alive anymore?'" Isaacs said. "The other problem is he was born in East Germany. Now we have the reunification. Do they still have East Germany in their archives? Did he flee when the Berlin Wall was created?"

Germany requires all citizens to report where they live, and so Isaacs learned from the mayor's office that Boch had left Reichenbach in 1956 to study in Leipzig. He fled East Germany in 1960 — a year before the wall went up — taking only two suitcases.

Isaacs found him — or someone she thought could be him — in Heidenheim, a town in southern Germany on the border of Bavaria. This man was married, had raised two sons and enjoyed a successful career as a pharmaceutical company executive. Boch did not recall having had an American pen pal named Caryl Koepke.

Then Isaacs copied one of his letters and mailed it to him.

"Everything came back to him," Isaacs said.

She dashed off an e-mail to Youngman and May: "I found him!"

Next came a flurry of excited correspondence — with assistance from Isaacs, as Boch had forgotten much of his English. He was delighted and moved to hear from his long-lost pen pal.

When Boch left East Germany, he was forced to leave behind his parents, friends and most personal belongings, including his pen pal letters and photos. He was thrilled when Youngman e-mailed him some of his childhood photos that he hadn't seen in 60 years. Young Gerhard is pictured in one photo, wearing a jacket, shorts and knee-high socks as he stands in front of a German car.

In return, he mailed Youngman a CD of German music, "Wiener Walzer," after she told him she thought of him when she heard the "Blue Danube Waltz" on the radio.

He wrote: "You like Johann Strauss. We also."

Boch, responding to questions posed by the Tribune, wrote in an e-mail that his life roiled with change during those early years.

"All letters to West Germany and to the free world were controlled by the Stasi, and one had to fear restrictions such as not being allowed to enter university or even to be imprisoned," he wrote. "So I was forced to wipe out all thoughts about Caryl and the U.S.A."

Over the decades, Caryl graduated from Carthage College and taught home economics at Warren Township High School in Gurnee, the same school that she had attended. She married the "new doctor in town," Edward May, in 1966, she said. The couple raised three girls and a boy.

Caryl May later taught preschool and worked behind the counter at a Libertyville camera store. She never forgot her pen pal.

As it turned out, Boch traveled to America at least 20 times and was in Chicago twice.